Original Article

Evaluation of Serum pro-BNP and hs-CRP Levels with Echocardiography Data in Patients with Heart Failure

  • Hüseyin DEDE
  • Fettah SAMETOĞLU
  • Berrin BERÇİK İNAL
  • Mustafa ŞAHİN
  • Güvenç GÜVENEN

İstanbul Med J 2010;11(3):97-103

Objectives:

Heart failure is a complex clinical syndrome in which an abnormality of cardiac structure or function is responsible for the inability of the heart to eject sufficient blood as required by the body tissues. ECHO (echocardiography) is the most reliable but costly method in the diagnosis of heart failure. In this study, the significance and correlation between echocardiographic findings and the serum levels of both pro-B-type natriuretic peptide (pro-BNP) and high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) levels are evaluated.

Methods:

A total of 50 patients (22 women, 28 men) with the diagnosis of heart failure and disease and 40 healthy individuals (16 women, 24 men) as control subjects were included in our study. The serum levels of pro-BNP and hs-CRP were determined in the group of heart failure patients with ejection fraction (EF) values under 50% and in normal individuals (control subjects).

Results:

Mean age ± SD of the groups included in the study was 60.76±17.04 (n=90). The correlation values between serum levels of both pro-BNP and hs-CRP with EFs were r=0.360 (p=0.0001) and r=-0.392 (p=0.0001), respectively. Mean ± SD values in patients with EF under 50% and with EF above 50% were 9038.04±10665 and 1914.47±7828.76 (p=0.001), respectively, for pro-BNP and 3.20 ± 3.63 and 0.54±0.70 (p=0.001), respectively, for hs-CRP.

Conclusion:

In this study, our results showed that both serum hs-CRP and pro-BNP levels were higher in patients with heart failure and that the prognostic value of high serum hs-CRP levels was independent from serum pro-BNP levels in these patients.

Keywords: Brain natriuretic peptide,echocardiography,heart failure